Tuesday, December 9, 2014

Civic Data and Collective Impact

Civic leaders interested in bringing sustained positive
change to their communities make choices every day as to how to use their financial,
physical and social capital. Those choices are usually informed by experience, lessons
learned from others and intuition. Too rarely they are informed by what I call “civic data.”

Civic data is the translation of relevant quantitative and qualitative measures into a narrative that is shared and used to inform and guide decisions.

Civic leaders -- those individuals who are willing to
assume shared responsibility for achieving and sustaining positive change
within their community -- need civic data to better understand what to do, whether what they are doing is working and to persuade others to alter their actions. Achieving what some call "collective impact" cannot be achieved without civic data.

Civic data has three distinct uses:

To help civic leaders understand the type of
change our community should seek. As
Josh McManus of the Knight Foundation observes, “We need to fall in love with
the problem.” One reason we need to fall in love with a problem is sustaining
positive change requires civic leaders to make very difficult and challenging
decisions (behavior change is never easy). Civic leaders are more likely to
take those actions if they care passionately – are in love with the problem. Unlike
affairs of the heart, when it comes to civic affairs our love needs to be
informed with facts, figures, trends and other data that helps us understand
what is going well and needs to be reinforced and what isn’t and needs to be
transformed. Civic data alone cannot help us understand the change we should
seek; but we cannot define the change without it.

To help civic leaders develop a collective
understanding of the progress individual and collective efforts are making
toward the desired change. The desired change should be articulated by a clear,
measurable goal(s). The metrics used and data collected/synthesized to assess
that progress should be widely accepted, used and communicated among those who have
assumed shared responsibility for and/or are affected by the change.

To help individuals make critical decisions.
Choices regarding the education of their children, the career they pursue, the
neighborhood where they live, the type of business they start, where to locate
their business can be informed by readily accessible, relevant and current civic
data.

What “civic data” is available and who is responsible for developing
it varies based on its intended use. For example, to truly understand the
complexity of a civic system (such as entrepreneurship, education or workforce development systems)
we may need to have access to a wide range of measures and information. But
that data may only be needed for a one-time or periodic assessment. Once what
truly matters within a civic system is well understood and a goal is defined a
community may need a much narrower data set to measure its progress. However, a
community will need that data to be current and widely understood. If the civic data is to be used to
inform the decisions of individuals, it will also need to be very accessible.

Advocates for civic data often make the incorrect assumption
that there is demand for it among public officials, private sector executives,
foundation leaders and others. Demand often needs to be built as civic leaders may
be comfortable or accustomed to making decisions with limited or no civic data.
Many communities use valuable resources to create civic data – often made
accessible through a “community dashboard” – that are not regularly used by
either civic leaders or residents. The civic data is curated to meet the
expectations of the advocates rather than the needs of civic leaders and
individuals.

Experience teaches us that centralizing responsibility for civic
data distances the data from the decision makers. Responsibility for civic data
should be embedded with those who are responsible for coordinating the
community’s efforts to achieve the clear, measurable goals in question. For
example, Summit Education Initiative (SEI) helps coordinate the community’s
efforts to achieve very clear education goals. It has effectively used civic
data to help stakeholders identify those goals and it helps stakeholders use
data to identify strategies and practices to achieve those goals. The civic
data and the civic strategy are embedded within the same organization.

Most importantly, civic leaders (particularly funders) need to value the civic data enough to continue to use it to inform their allocation of capital, as well as their other actions.

About Me

I help organizational leaders catalyze enduring, positive change by exercising collaborative leadership. My consulting firm, Civic Collaboration Consultants, helps design and support effective cross-sector collaborations within complex civic systems ranging from economic development and workforce to public health and food security. I worked for nearly a decade with the Fund for Our Economic Future, a collaboration of philanthropy that supports strategies that advance job creation, job access and job preparation in Northeast Ohio. The Fund provided me with an opportunity to learn from multiple cross-sector collaborations. I write two blogs sporadically. One -- SteelPursuit -- covers my passion for chasing steelhead and stream trout. The other -- Regional Physics -- tries to capture the personal lessons I'm learning about how to inspire and support effective cross-sector collaborations.